Value Center slider

Meet the Team

Center for Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care

Catherine MacLean, MD, PhD

Chief Value Medical Officer

Catherine MacLean, MD, PhD is the Chief Value Medical Officer at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), where she leads the development and execution of strategies to measure, report and improve healthcare value. As part of this role she directs the HSS Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care, which pulls together expertise from across the organization to rapidly develop and deploy programs, systems and tools that will fast-track the delivery of high value musculoskeletal care at HSS and beyond. She is a nationally recognized expert on healthcare quality and value with a diverse leadership experience including strategic planning, implementation and evaluation of population health, quality and value programs. She has previously served as the executive leader of quality and care management programs at Anthem/WellPoint; principal investigator on numerous academic research projects at UCLA and RAND; and as a director, chair or participant on numerous national committees and panels related to health care quality and value.

Dr. MacLean obtained her MD from Washington University, St. Louis. She completed training in internal medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and in rheumatology at UCLA's Center for the Health Sciences. She obtained her PhD in health services from UCLA's School of Public Health.

Matthew Titmuss

Assistant Vice President of Value Management

Matthew Titmuss is the Assistant Vice President at the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care. After a 20-year career in the printing industry serving as VP of Operations for a large national company, Matthew returned to school and received his B.A. from Fordham University and a Doctorate in Physical Therapy from The CUNY Graduate Center. Matthew joined HSS in 2009 as a physical therapist and rose to Senior Director of the Acute Rehabilitation department. Since joining Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care his focus on quality outcomes and understanding the clinical operations of the hospital have enabled Matthew to take leadership role in the management and development several successful programs.

He successfully implemented the collection of patient reported outcomes on all patients at HSS as standard of care. Additionally Matthew oversees management of HSS patients who are part of the CJR bundle, implementing a program with over 30 partner nursing homes that ensures the highest quality of care is received whilst significantly reducing length of stay and variation of treatment. Matthew set up the Readmission Task force and facilitated the implementation of a program to monitor high-risk patients once they leave HSS and from this played a key role in the development of a presurgical risk optimization pilot program.

Matthew was the Keynote speaker at the International Arthroplasty Symposium Hospital Alvorada, São Paolo February 2016 and a Contributor to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons textbook “Post-Operative Rehabilitation” published in 2017. He co-authored “Therapeutic exercise for OA” published by the American Physical Therapy Association in 2011.

Matthew is currently enrolled “The Fundamentals of Value-Based Health Care” at Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Policy, continues to treat patients, and in his spare time enjoys to hike the White Mountains, travel to Europe and bicycle the parks of New York city with his three daughters.

Vinicius C. Antao, MD, MSc, PhD

Senior Director of Health Outcomes Strategy

Vinicius Antao, MD, MSc, PhD, is a Senior Director in the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care, where he is responsible for supporting the creation and implementation of state of the art registries and the development of strategy and operational means to improve collection and analysis of clinical data and quality outcomes. As part of this role, he is leading the implementation of condition-specific patient-reported outcome measures collection for all Service Lines at HSS.

Dr. Antao was previously Lead of the Registries Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseeing all activities related to several national registries. Prior to working with the CDC, he was Senior Manager at GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), where he designed and implemented epidemiological studies in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Before that, he was a Senior Service Fellow with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health/CDC, participating in Health Hazard Evaluations, analyzing large databases, creating innovative surveillance methodologies, and developing numerous research studies, and an Associate Professor with Rio de Janeiro State University, where he collaborated in the creation of a Reference Center for Occupational Lung Diseases.

Dr. Antao obtained his MD from Petropolis Medical School, his Masters in Sciences from Fluminense Federal University, and his PhD degree in Respiratory Medicine from Sao Paulo University, in Brazil, and completed post-doctoral training in Epidemiology with the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service Program. See Dr. Antao's publications.

Mark Alan Fontana, PhD

Senior Director of Data Science

Dr. Fontana is an economist and Senior Director of Data Science at the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care at HSS. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Healthcare Policy & Research at Weill Cornell Medical College. A digital native, his interests are interdisciplinary and empirical, focused on the intersection of health policy, machine learning, survey and experimental design, mobile health, and behavioral economics. He has an overarching interest in applying his technical and analytical skills to problems that involve large-scale computational tasks. He is fascinated by data and data collection methods not traditionally available to social scientists (spanning academic and industry sources). His work at HSS focuses on (1) collecting novel patient information through digital and mobile platforms (e.g., goals, presenteeism), (2) leveraging machine learning and large datasets to predict patient outcomes for creating pre-treatment decision-support tools and augmenting post-treatment patient monitoring (e.g., predicting patient-reported outcome measures, complications, readmissions, or running injury), (3) evaluating the effectiveness of those tools and monitoring techniques beyond simple predictive power (i.e., do they actually help patients’ downstream outcomes), (4) miscellaneous policy-related research (e.g., trends utilization of services following initial diagnosis of low back pain or osteoarthritis, or evaluating consumer-facing hospital quality rating systems), and (5) helping oversee and organize the Center’s portfolio of analytics projects (e.g., the creation of various dashboards for tracking patients). His PhD in economics is from the University of Michigan, where his dissertation investigated the pro-health impact of mobile push notifications, adaptive survey methods for measuring financial risk tolerance, and how genetic predispositions moderate the impact of cigarette tax policy. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California’s Behavioral and Health Genomics Center, where his research focused on identifying genetic variants associated with behavioral phenotypes (e.g. risk-taking, depression, educational attainment), as well as supervising the design and development of a mobile platform for collecting behavioral and game data. He also has a master’s in operations research from Cornell University, where he received his bachelor’s in economics and government.See Dr. Fontana's publications.

Gourab Sarker

Value Analyst

Gourab serves as a Value Analyst at the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care. As an undergraduate, he conducted extensive basic and clinical research. He also completed an internship at Gilead Sciences Inc. where he developed business analysis tools.

Gourab’s interests lie in using large claims databases to perform population health analysis, evaluating hospital performance, and creating informative data visualizations. He is also interested in the intersection of health policy and data analytics to further improve quality measurement.

Gourab is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Biochemistry and Economics.

Miranda So

Value Analyst

Miranda So is a Value Analyst at the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care. Prior to joining HSS, she worked as a data analytics consultant solving data problems for large pharmaceutical companies.

Miranda graduated with an M.B.S. in Data Analytics from Rutgers University, completing a capstone project on the analysis and prediction of critical care hospital readmissions. While at Rutgers, she also developed and taught workshops on using Python for analytics as part of a pilot program from the Rutgers Libraries, seeking to equip the research community with tools for better data analysis.

Miranda also obtained an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University, where she conducted biomaterials research on targeted therapies for atherosclerosis.

Michelle Richardson

Value Research Assistant

Michelle Richardson is a Research Assistant at the Center for the Advancement of Value in Musculoskeletal Care. She received a B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering with concentrations in Engineering Biology and Global Health and Health Policy from Princeton University. For her senior thesis, Michelle investigated the structure and biological function of a novel RiPP (ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide). At Hospital for Special Surgery, Michelle has been involved in numerous projects that study novel patient outcomes to inform the delivery of high-value, patient-centered care. She is also involved in the team’s efforts to develop a personalized health management tool. As an aspiring physician, Michelle hopes to incorporate value-based care into her future practice.